The Arbiters
by Robert DeWarren
Summary: Why was there only Little Sisters? Simple. Because with Little Brothers there was... Complications with the integration of ADAM. Follow the story of one of these now grown-up Little Brothers as he works to earn his freedom.


'**Lo everyone! I just had this idea and wanted to put it out there. Like all my stories, updates will be sporadic and possibly non-existent, so my apologies.**

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Deep in the bowels of the ruins of the city of Rapture, is a lab unlike any other. The machinery still glows faintly, as if trying to stave off the inevitable darkness that will occur when finally they relent.

In this lab is where a secondary, lesser known branch of experimentation went on during Raptures glory days. For you see, despite Ryan's offhand comment about the reason behind only using female children to gather ADAM was simply that it was Tenenbaum's choice, there was a reason, one that everyone involved in the experiments wished to forget.

It was in this lab that young male children were turned into ADAM slug hosts. First stages of the process went perfectly well, and they adapted and acted just like their female counterparts, happily performing whatever task their keepers set out for them to do.

The problems started, as many problems do, at puberty.

At a young age, there is little difference between the male and female brains, but as time goes on, defining changes occur. There is a chemical "bridge" between the brain's two hemispheres, that remains throughout a females life. However, when hormone and chemical changes begin happening in young men, that "bridge" is severed.

In normal people, it simply means that when confronted with a task requiring the use of both the logical and creative halves of the brain at the same time, women will do better, while any task requiring purely logical or purely creative thinking will be performed better by men.

Of course, ADAM changes that considerably.

When a Little Sister enters puberty, the ADAM in her interacts with her brain, and with a little nudging from the outside, a Big Sister is born. Intelligent enough to understand orders, stupid enough to obey them blindly, they are the perfect soldiers. Incredibly strong with mental abilities far above the average human, they are the elite soldiers of Rapture.

However, when a Little Brother began entering puberty, there was a difference. While the ADAM-infused hormones spread throughout the Little Sisters' brains evenly, the lack of a chemical "bridge" prevented that in the Little Brothers. They grew, yes, but radically differently. While the Big Sisters were the perfect amalgam of mental and physical, there was no such balance in the male subjects.

The first of the group to develop became large. Just a small change at first, but soon the doctors realized he was outgrowing his clothes at an alarming rate. Within two weeks of the first change, he was nearly seven feet tall with hyper-developed musculature. He became angry, belligerent, and above all, stupid. Barely able to string together a three word sentence, the doctors began calling him, and the others who developed like him, Goliaths, as Big Brothers would group them and the other males together, and nothing could be farther from the truth.

Where Goliaths were large and physical, the others, deemed Arbiters, were not. Developing no astounding physical traits, aside from the odd glow of their veins stemming from the incredible amount of ADAM running through their systems, they were at first thought mostly unremarkable. This change drastically one day.

One of the Arbiters was being tested to see if the one claim to fame they had (able to produce ADAM at a rate of 1.7x that of a Big Sister) was worth using in a sort of farming operation, when the young man was discovered to have Trypanophobia, or fear of needles. When the doctor ignored his requests to not use a hypodermic needle to withdraw blood, the young man lashed out with his mind, throwing the doctor, and all other loose items in the room, against the wall. That was the day that it was discovered Arbiters were the single greatest Plasmid users on the planet.

Between the strength of the Goliaths and the Plasmids of the Arbiters, the scientists at first thought that they had hit gold. But nothing is that easy.

Unlike the Big Sisters, the young men were uncontrollable. The Goliaths were so unintelligent and engaged that they couldn't follow orders, while the Arbiters were so powerful and intelligent that they wouldn't follow orders.

The files on the Big Brother project were labeled "Results Disappointing, possibilities limited." The original ideas of using the Arbiters as ADAM factories, as well as using Goliaths as guard dogs, was what kept them from flushing all of the subjects out into the ocean.

But then the Rapture civil war came about, and for the most part the Arbiters and Goliaths were lost in the sands of time, a somewhat interesting failed experiment to be written off.

But some things are just to stubborn to be forgotten permanently.

One of these things was subject 2120, a young Arbiter laying asleep on the cot in his cell, the remains of the food from the automated dispenser on the ground beside him. He had lain there since the last scientist had locked the doors, just before it was announced that Atlas and Ryan had men shooting up the streets.

Being one of the many "failed experiments" of Andrew Ryan's Great Chain, he was a nobody who could amount to nothing in the previous, Utopian Rapture. But who knows how long ago that was. A couple of years ago, he had heard 2119 whisper, "Ryan's dead, slain by his son," and while 2120 had never heard of Ryan having a son, 2119 was the most talented amongst them at walking outside of his body, and was the only one with enough skill at it to go past the lab walls, made with thick, leaden barriers to prevent just such a thing.

And now 2119 was saying something else. "Lambs gone mad. An old Big Daddy is fighting her. We'll get our chance soon."

2120 smiled as he heard these words. Further down he hall, he could hear another Arbiter giggling at the prospects the pseudo-prophesy could bring, as well as one of the Goliaths giving a guttural laugh.

After all, none of them had ever known 2119 to be wrong before.


End file.
